Peter Rowan & Don Edwards - High Lonesome Cowboy (1983)

"Peter Rowan and Don Edwards have been around awhile, and their grey hair shows it as they lean against the truck old as they are on their CD cover. Rowan is a bluegrass performer, and Edwards sings western songs. Together with veteran guitarists Tony Rice and Norman Blake, they have put together a wonderful collection of mostly traditional songs that sound like they've sprung straight from the high plains and Rocky Mountains of Colorado Springs, where this album was recorded.
I first learned of Rowan and Edwards hearing a song "Buddies in the Saddle" on the bluegrass channel of satellite TV (wonderful invention for music lovers otherwise stuck with urban format commercial radio -- deliver us from what's happened to C&W). Turns out "Buddies in the Saddle" is a Maybelle Carter song, about the friendship of two cowboys, one of whom is lost in a storm. Sung in harmony with an upbeat tempo and such sweet sincerity by two seasoned voices, it got me to buy the whole album, and I was not disappointed. Every song in the collection is arranged handsomely and performed with fine accoustic muscianship -- guitars, mandolin, banjo, and bass.

The songs make up a rich variety of styles, tempos, instrumentation, and voices. There is the aching ballad "The Night Guard," about a lovelorn young cowboy on the trail who is killed by a long-horned steer. In another vein is Woody Guthrie's "Reno Blues" about the fate of a Philadelphia lawyer. The traditional "Goodbye Old Paint," sung simply with two voices, guitar and banjo, evokes another era of wagon trains and dusty cattle drives. And there's a long, mellow, gently rocking version of Bill Monroe's "Midnight on the Stormy Deep."